’Meeting with Traditional Music’

The Institute of Musicology (University of Warsaw) and Collegium Musicum UW with The University of Warsaw Museum invite you to a ’Meeting with Traditional Music’. It will be an interesting confrontation of two geographically distant folk musical traditions: pastoral singing from Sardinia and the songs of Poniemnie, the Polish-Belarusian-Lithuanian borderland.

The opportunity for this unusual meeting was provided by a visit to Poland by the vocal group Amici del Canto Sardo. The ensemble, founded in Sassari in 1999, cultivates the tradition, still popular in Sardinia, of male pastoral singing, dance songs and religious chants. We will hear both religious songs in the ’cuncord’ and ’gosos’ style, from the ’Degh’annos’ album recorded by the ensemble in 2009, as well as dance songs in the ’cantu a ghiterra’ style and the ’cionfra’ style, typical of the Sassari region.

The songs presented, arranged for the choir by its conductor Salvatore Bulla, are firmly rooted in Sardinian culture, both in terms of text and music. It is worth mentioning that the Sardinian singing of the ’cantu a tenore’ was inscribed on UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage List in 2006.

The Poniemnie ensemble, on the other hand, has been active since 2022 under the auspices of the Faculty of Culture and Arts. The ensemble’s repertoire consists of traditional folk songs from the Poniemnie area, sung a cappella in local Polish and Belarusian dialects. The ensemble reconstructs the repertoire that was collected during ethnomusicological field research in and around the Neman River basin in Belarus. Poniemnie has already won prizes in the Stara Tradycja 2022 (Old Tradition 2022) competition and has released a CD entitled ’Pieśni Poniemnia. Songs of Beskid Sądecki’. The ensemble’s programme and preparation is the responsibility of Anastasiya Niakrasava.

Tuesday, 3 October 2023, 5:00 pm
Ballroom of the Tyszkiewicz-Potocki Palace of the University of Warsaw
Krakowskie Przedmieście 32

Admission free – number of seats limited!

We encourage you to register via email: ijanuszkiewicz@uw.edu.pl.